Lesser known companies that stand on the world

Fastly controls the largest forum in the world

Reddit is the biggest forum, Spotify is one of the biggest music streaming providers - both are based on the Fastly content delivery network. Fastly has already experienced an outage in 2021 that temporarily shut down Reddit and Spotify. The New York Times, Amazon, Paypal also use Fastly, so at that time they were frantically looking for a solution because they were recording huge losses every second.

What exactly is Fastly or a content delivery network? A content delivery network, or CDN, is a geographically distributed group of servers that cache content near end users. A CDN enables the rapid transfer of resources needed to load web content, including HTM pages, JavaScript files, images, and videos.

Their last outage lasted "only" an hour, the next one could have much more consequences, also because more and more websites are using their services.

Okta is a well-known name in the business world

Identity management is not an exciting topic, but it carries an important responsibility in companies. Okta is identity management software from the company of the same name, which helps companies manage sign-ups to services and business programs. Every time you log into your work account via the SSO (Single Sign-On) portal, there is a high probability that this portal is under the umbrella of Okta. Okta also has a multi-factor authentication tool and a customer identity management tool.

In the event of an outage, employees worldwide would be unable to access their work accounts. Especially in healthcare and finance, this could cause massive chaos. Companies that have backup access systems in place would likely be able to continue working, but the question is how many companies are using this approach.

VMWare - a virtual nightmare

VMWare is a company that makes a living with virtualization and cloud computing. In server virtualization, a hypervisor installed on a physical server allows multiple virtual machines to run on the same server. Each virtual machine can run its own operating system, and all machines share resources, for example network, RAM... A huge number of companies from all industries (healthcare, finance, public administration...) use their technologies and in the event of an outage, work would stop all over the world.

Who is responsible for security?

There are many security companies, among the more famous and widespread is Zscaler, which has several hundred of the largest companies in the world in its portfolio. They provide employees with secure access to the network and the ability to filter network traffic. They also ensure uninterrupted remote work and redirect the traffic of remote workers through their secure cloud services. Zscaler and Microsoft often collaborate, so their services connect well with Microsoft Azure.

In the event of an outage, companies would lose the ability to communicate with partners and customers, and employees would be practically cut off from the world.

There are many lesser-known companies on which the world is based. Cloudflare is another CDN company, like Fastly, which is also known for its security services. Sophos and their endpoint protection solutions are also used worldwide.

What the CrowdStrike outage revealed is the fact that the world's IT infrastructure is highly vulnerable. If a major outage were to occur, catastrophic consequences could be felt around the world.

Cover image: Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik